I'll be very surprised if the sanctions blocked hospitals from purchasing medical supplies. If anything, I'd suspect the problem was poverty.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/01/world/iraq-sanctions-kill...
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/magazine/were-sanctions-r...
This one looks promising:
https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/report/57jqa...
That's a natural result of any sanctions. You may decide to oppose any sanctions to avoid this result, but when the alternative is violent military, there's a good argument to why this is the lesser evil.
"The alternative" is what every president from Washington through Arthur would have advocated: stay on our own continent and mind our own business.
No, I asked for a source for the claim that the US blocked essential medical supplies as part of the embargo.
> "The alternative" is what every president from Washington through Arthur would have advocated: stay on our own continent and mind our own business.
Wouldn't mind that at all! However, since I don't make these decisions, then I will persist: sanctions are better than the violent killing of war.
Take the sanctions against Russia or Iran. Sure, we can be against those sanctions. Then Russia will invade the rest of Ukraine, killing many thousands.
It's the easiest thing in the world to say "I'm just against any sort of killing". Makes you seem benevolent. However, in reality we must choose between alternatives that are often all bad, some just a bit more so.
I am not "against any sort of killing". If I have a good enough reason to kill I will do it. I have killed lots of animals while hunting and dealing with livestock. I am not "benevolent". However, I am also not evil. It is for that reason that I don't want my tax dollars used to kill innocent children in foreign lands. The killing done by Assad, Qaddafi, Saddam, and the Taliban is on their own heads. (The killing done by ISIS is on ours, because we created and sustained ISIS.) In my parents' lifetimes, we have never improved a situation overseas by invading. By that measure I suppose sanctions are a little better, because it's arguable that e.g. South Africa was improved by sanctions...
The Russians have a ton more guns and tanks.
Like it or not, Russians don't invade Ukraine because of repercussions, and sanctions are part of that.
If we were back in 1940, the Russians would have taken over Ukraine long ago.
> (The killing done by ISIS is on ours, because we created and sustained ISIS.)
Conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy theory.
AQI developed in Iraq after we had completely destroyed civil society there and created a vacuum of law and order. AQI developed into ISIS after we further disrupted both Iraq and Syria, in those regions of both nations where no one (including armies of USA, Iraq, Syria, Russia...) dared venture. For many years, most of their arms and ammunition came from American-supplied caches "stolen" from the apocryphal "good rebels" that we were repeatedly told actually existed and would kick out Assad real soon now. This is basic recent international history. How is it that you haven't kept up with this?
Read some history of the cold war. USSR was happy to invade and subdue its weak neighbors in the past, in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, all the way up to the 70s. It won't do the same today because of international retaliation, part of which are sanctions.
Russia had no right to invade Crimea. They just did because they had the military might to do so. If your argument is that they should be allowed to do so without consequences, then I strongly disagree. Your position makes you feel morally superior, but in reality it will pave the way to WWIII with Russia increasingly emboldened to extend militarily until an inevitable clash.
> AQI developed in Iraq after we had completely destroyed civil society there and created a vacuum of law and order.
By that logic, UK and France are responsible for the Nazi regime and all the evils it has done because they defeated Germany in WWI and created the conditions for the rise of the Nazi party.
There's a fashionable trend to blame the US as "directly responsible" for everything bad that goes on the world, by applying preposterous liability standards that nobody has ever applied to any other nation in history.
USA get the tiny amount of international criticism we receive because we keep doing the same awful misguided things while claiming that we expect different results. We aren't all crazy, so at least some of us are liars. Indeed those are the same liars who came up with the ridiculous "world police" canard of preposterous liability in the first place. Who kills whom in other hemispheres really doesn't affect us enough that we should waste our wealth and soldiers' lives pretending to do something about it.
Yes, like it or not, they do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_interventio...
Which contradicts the OP's claim that sanctions don't create casualties.
A study by Lancet - briefly, that hundreds of thousands of 'excess deaths' were caused by sanctions.
It's not something our intellectual culture is particularly comfortable with - drawing lines between death, and the policies that cause death, perhaps because we don't take statistics as seriously as we do causal stories.
That's not always the case. The sanctions against Iraq, put in place around 1991 (after Gulf War 1), lead to the deaths of 1000s upon 1000s of children, as hospitals couldn't acquire critical supplies like incubators.